not feel what traditionally she should
feel, that is what a primitive Italian woman might feel, all of whose
emotional life had found no other outlet than sex. . . .

Well, if it was so, it was so. For better or for worse, that was the
kind of woman she had become, with the simple, forthright physical life
subordinate, humble; like a pleasant, lovable child playing among the
strong, full-grown, thought-freighted interests and richly varied
sympathies and half-impersonal joys and sorrows which had taken
possession of her days. And she could not think that the child could
ever again be master of her destiny, any more than (save in a moment of
false sentimentality) she could think that she would like to have her
horizon again limited by a doll-house. To be herself was to go on, not
to go back, now that she knew what she had become. It seemed to her that
never before had she stood straight up.

And in plain fact she found that somehow she had risen to her feet and
was now standing, her head up, almost touching the rafters of the slant
ceiling. She could have laughed out, to find herself so free. She knew
now why she had never known the joy of battle. It was because she had
been afraid. And she had been afraid because she had never dared to
enter the battle, had always sent others in to do her fighting for her.
Now she had been forced into it and had won. And there was nothing to be
afraid of, there!

She spread out her arms in a great gesture of liberation. How had she
ever lived before, under the shadow of that coward fear? This . . . this
. . . she had a moment of vision . . . this was what Neale had been trying
to do for her, all these years, unconsciously, not able to tell her what
it was, driving at the mark only with the inarticulate wisdom of his
love for her, his divination of her need. He had seen her, shivering and
shrinking in the shallow waters, and had longed for her sake to have her
strike out boldly into the deep. But even if he had been ever so able to
tell her, she would not have understood till she had fought her way
through those ravening breakers, beyond them, out into the sustaining
ocean.

How long it took, how _long_ for men and women to make the smallest
advance! And how the free were the only ones who could help to liberate
the bound. How she had fought against Neale's effort to set her free,
had cried to him that she dared not risk herself on the depths, that he
must have the strength to swim f